thought of being held that close to him made her ache inside.
Firmly she shook her head. ‘No thank you.’
But Alexi was already reaching for her hand and leading her away. ‘Excuse us, Julia,’ he said over his shoulder.
As soon as they made their way onto the floor everyone gathered around them to applaud. And suddenly Katie felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world. All these people thought Alexi was in love with her—and he wasn’t. He probably never would be.
The night air was warm, yet she shivered as he pulled her into his arms.
She tried to hold herself slightly apart from him.
‘Relax, Katie.’ He murmured the words against her ear and kissed the side of her face. Then he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close in against him.
The gesture was probably for the audience’s sake, but it felt so good that it made little pangs of desire dart deep inside her. For a moment she allowed herself to lean in against him dreamily. Allowed herself to imagine that they were an ordinary couple who had just got married because they were very much in love. Allowed herself to dream that Alexi was crazy about her.
Alexi stroked a hand down over her back. ‘The evening has been a great success,’ he murmured against her ear. ‘Everyone loves you.’
Except the one person whose love really mattered to her.
The painful reality swirled in like the tide.
Desperately she tried to ignore it. But being in his arms like this was too pleasurable, and the bittersweet feelings wouldn’t go away.
She couldn’t deal with this situation, she thought suddenly, and as the music changed to another romantic ballad she pulled away from him abruptly.
‘Alexi, do you think we could go now?’
He looked down into the bright blue of her eyes, and was shocked when he saw the haunted shadows of unhappiness there.
‘Are you OK?’ The gentleness of his voice made her feel even more wretched, but she forced herself to smile.
‘Yes, just a bit tired. I think my body clock is all over the place.’
Alexi nodded and let her go. ‘It’s getting late anyway.’ He smiled. ‘And we are on our honeymoon; people can’t expect us to socialise too much …’
She tried to smile back. But she just couldn’t now.
It took longer than Katie had hoped to get away. They got entangled up with goodbyes. And Alexi’s mother insisted that they should take food home with them.
‘I have the impression she thought you were in need of a good square meal,’ Alexi said with a laugh when they finally got into the car. ‘The fact that I’ve not only got a fully stocked kitchen back at the house, but also a chef willing to cook anything we’d like, seems to be lost on her.’
‘It’s because she’s your mother and she wants to take care of you—and you should never take that for granted,’ Katie told him softly. ‘Because not everyone has a relationship like that with their parents.’
Silence fell between them as the warmth and light of the house was left behind. The road was pitch-black ahead except for the silvery gleam of the powerful headlights as they cut through the countryside.
‘I heard you saying tonight that you never knew your father,’ Alexi said suddenly. ‘That must have been tough.’
‘Yes, it was.’ For a moment Katie thought about the past, about how very different their upbringings were.
‘What happened to him?’ Alexi asked.
‘Precisely nothing happened to him,’ Katie informed him flatly. ‘I was born, but he wasn’t remotely interested. Not everyone has your sense of duty, Alexi.’
‘I don’t want my child out of a sense of duty, Katie,’ he told her in a low tone. ‘My feelings for our baby go much deeper than that.’
‘Yes, of course.’ She bit down on her lip.
‘So did your dad walk out when you were born? Or were your parents never together?’
‘They were never together.’ Katie looked up at the sky. It was so bright—she had never seen the stars so clear. Something about the darkness made her relax a little. ‘Lucy is really my half-sister. My mother was divorced when Lucy was three, and I don’t think she ever really recovered from that divorce. Lucy’s father was the real love of my mother’s life, as she’d tell us on regular occasions.’
‘And your father?’ Alexi asked gently.
‘Just an affair she had to try and make herself feel better after the divorce. And when she told him she was pregnant he didn’t want to know.’
Silence stretched between them, filled with the steady thud of her heartbeats.
‘The irony is that my mother always thought that Lucy’s father might have come back to her, except apparently he didn’t want me. I wasn’t part of the equation.’
‘He mustn’t have really loved her, because if he had the fact that she had a child to someone else wouldn’t have mattered to him,’ Alexi told her gently. ‘He’d have loved you, too, because you were a part of her.’
She shrugged. ‘Unfortunately my mother wasn’t that rational when it came to matters of the heart. She just never got over Brian. And she kept on choosing the wrong men.
They would move in and they would move out. After a few years Lucy used to get away from it occasionally by going to stay with her dad and his new wife. They were the worst times of all. Life without Lucy was … unbearable. We used to share a room, and somehow it seemed safer when she was there.’
Alexi felt his stomach churn. God alone knew what she had been through!
‘Anyway, I don’t know why I am telling you this.’ She suddenly felt embarrassed that she had opened up to him like that. ‘And my mother was a good woman; she tried very hard to do her best for me and for Lucy. It’s certainly not easy being a single parent.’
Suddenly Alexi understood her fierce need for independence—she must never really have felt loved as a child. Her mother trying to apportion blame on her for her ex-husband’s unwillingness to try and resolve their differences was almost barbarically cruel, to his mind. How could you blame an innocent child for being born?
He understood now how vulnerable she must have felt when she had discovered she was pregnant. He understood why she had agreed to this marriage—she would want her child to have all the love and security that she’d never had. It would be desperately important to her—more important even than her own happiness.
For a moment he remembered the way she had looked up at him when he had placed the wedding band on her finger. The shimmering vulnerability cut through him like a knife.
Obviously this marriage was the last thing she wanted, but she was desperately trying to do the right thing. She probably
